As for the woman, she tapped my nose with her fingertip and said, “Happy?”
“Very,” I replied from the heart.
She took my left hand in both of hers and murmured, “What a wonderful child you are.”
“A child in his third decade!” I said with an embarrassed laugh.
Then a look of seriousness and concern flashed in her eyes, and I noticed her running her fingers over my wedding band. With a stunned look on her face, she cried, “Are you married? That never even crossed my mind!”
Fear came over me, and I looked at her without saying a word.
Then she laughed out loud and said, “How is it that that never even occurred to me? But how can I believe this? My Lord, why did you run after me? Isn’t your wife to your liking? How dissolute can you get?”
Discomfited and befuddled, I looked down and didn’t say a word.
“Don’t you love your wife?” she asked in a tone of concern.
I was vexed by the question, and I hesitated for a moment, not knowing what to say. However, the delicacy of the situation forced me to say in a voice that was barely audible, “She’s a nice lady.”
She broke in, saying, “I’m asking you whether you love her!”
Sensing that lying becomes a virtue when in the presence of women, I said with an indignation that I concealed with a smile, “No.”
Her features relaxed.
Then again she asked with concern, “How long have you been married?”
“Nearly two years,” I said, saddened by the mention of marriage.
“Didn’t you love her before?”
“No.”
“They married you to her without your having known her previously?”
“Yes.”
“What an unforgivable sin!” she cried angrily. “And she, doesn’t she love you?”
And for the first time I replied truthfully, “She doesn’t love love.”
Her eyes widened with incredulity, and she opened her mouth so wide that I saw a couple of gold teeth that I hadn’t seen before.
“Ahhhh,” she said. “Now I get it. There are women like that. And why wouldn’t there be? Not all women are complete.”
We exchanged a long, wordless look accompanied by a smile.
Then I asked her with a laugh, “And you. Aren’t you married?”
Without taking her eyes off me she replied, “I’m just a widow. My husband was a prominent rear admiral by the name of Ali Pasha Salam. When we married, he was old and I was young. Then a few years later he died. So I came back to live with my mother. And only God knows who I’ll be living with tomorrow!”
She smiled at me and began to whistle. Then she picked up her purse, took out a powder puff and proceeded to dust her face and her neck with it. After arranging her disheveled locks of hair, she cast a glance at her face in the car’s side mirror.
“When does your vacation end?” she asked.
“In a few days.”
“We’ll meet often,” she said calmly. “Every day, if possible. The car will do until we can find a more suitable place.”
She sat up straight again behind the steering wheel. However, I took hold of her wrist, then put my arm around her neck. She let out a brief chuckle and held me to her rounded bosom as she said, “Who do you think you are, smarty pants, making me spruce myself up all over again?”
56
I got back home at exactly 10:00 p.m. I didn’t ask myself whether I’d erred, since what I’d recovered by way of confidence and happiness went beyond questions of right and wrong. My mother had gone to sleep, and Rabab was sitting in bed reading a magazine. The minute I saw her lovely face, a joyous light glowed in my spirit, and I felt as though I were being transported from one world to another. I had a sudden pang of revulsion at what I’d done with myself, but it didn’t get the better of me, since it was driven out of my consciousness again by the thick veil that stood between me and my wife. She received me with a smile, conveying her aunt’s greetings and her reproach for my not having come with her. Then she told me that my supper was waiting on the dining room table, so I went in and devoured it like the hungry, tired person that I was. I came back to our room wondering what my wife would do if she knew of my transgression.
She told me she’d been invited to give private lessons to a first-grader who was the daughter of a prominent judge, and she asked me what I thought. Although I didn’t see any reason for suspicion, I wasn’t enthusiastic about the proposal, and I said, “You tire yourself out enough all day long!”
“You’re right,” she said casually.
Pleased by her quickness to agree with me, I thought to myself: I’ll never find the slightest reason to doubt her! I lay down beside her, whereupon she shoved the magazine aside, turned out the light and lay down peacefully. I had every reason to go right to sleep. Instead, however, I experienced a strange sort of wakefulness. My thoughts went flying away to Inayat, and to the car on Pyramids Road. I’d been unfaithful. How astounding! Who would have thought that an impotent husband would take a lover! At that moment I wished my wife could know of this astounding fact. However, the moment was a fleeting one, and it wasn’t long before my heart had shrunk in fear and shame. I’d gone trailing my wife, suspecting that she’d been unfaithful to me, and I ended up being unfaithful myself beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt. In her, I’d seen no evidence of anything but integrity and modesty. How was it that with her, my portion had been impotence and failure, whereas in the arms of the homely, crude woman, I’d been blessed with the wildest bliss? I was unspeakably confused, and my soul longed for a ray of light.
What made my confusion even worse was that I felt deeply that I couldn’t do without either of them. In fact, I couldn’t find any way to compare them in such a way as to see which was superior to the other. One of them was my spirit, and the other was my body, and my torment was that of someone who isn’t able to reconcile his body with his spirit. What would the world be worth without that lovely, pristine, nay, perfect face? But then again, what pleasure and sense of manhood would I have left if I lost the other woman? I became so engrossed in thought that there was no way to sleep. First Rabab would appear to me, and then Inayat. Then suddenly the vision in my mind’s eye turned for no apparent reason into my mother, who took her place in the string of successive images. My confusion finally reached the point where I was enveloped in a cloud of sadness and gloom. Nevertheless, the feelings one experiences by night rarely survive the light of day. By night they merge into the stream of a mysterious melody in a fog-enveloped, ethereal atmosphere. But once the day breaks, nothing remains of them but faint echoes that do nothing to prevent us from searching out our paths in life.
The morning of the fifth day arrived, and I took off as usual for Abbasiya. But was I really going there to trail Rabab, or was I going in obedience to that irresistible summons? My wife’s behavior left no room for doubt: what she was on the outside, she was on the inside. Hence, she must have told the truth in what she said about the ill-fated letter, and if there was a traitor, it was I.
I went to the Nubians’ coffee shop, which was the perfect symbol for my new love. I waited until the window opened, and we greeted one another with an amiable smile. She disappeared for a moment, then reappeared, ready to go out, gesturing to me to wait for her at the previous day’s rendezvous spot. I hadn’t expected us to meet in the morning. However, I called the waiter without hesitation, paid the tab, and headed straightaway for the bridge, which wasn’t far away. On my way there, it seemed to me that I’d realized a fact of life, namely, that there isn’t a single movement among men but that there’s a woman behind it. Women are to men’s lives what gravity is to the stars and other heavenly bodies. Hence, there isn’t a man alive but that there’s a woman in his imagination, be she present or absent, attainable or unattainable, loving or hateful, faithful or unfaithful. Now I understood in a new way the meaning of the saying, “Love is life, and life is love.” In fact, it hit me so forcefully, it was as though I were thinking about it for the first time. It wasn’t that there was life, after which there was love. Rather, there was love, therefore there was life. And at that moment I swore that never as long as I lived would I turn away from love!